Brian's ramblings on life, technology and photography... but mostly just purty pictures.

Tuesday, July 06, 2010

Rolling (Through) Hills

IT’s time (well, was time) for another road trip! Our longest yet, down to New Orleans – 1600 road miles from Denver.

There’s some really interesting terrain between Denver and New Orleans. There’s just not a whole lot of it. We spent the first day just getting to the other side of Kansas – it’s a damn big state!

Although it’s maybe not the single most interesting bit of the US, I actually enjoyed Kansas. It’s actually pretty in a wide-open sort of way, and not quite the Cartesian plain everyone says it is. The only real downside was that the sun turned the car into a greenhouse. After a while we were cruising along shirtless. But I’ll spare you those photos.

But we did get to see a little bit of roadside Americana in Kansas. We just happened to pass by this big (12 foot?) Buffalo Bill statue so we pulled off on a whim. They’re actually very nicely executed sculptures, and they look right at home on the Great Plains.

We also stopped off at the infamous Dodge City. Dodge City is not the archetypal Wild West town it once was, but they do have the Boot Hill Graveyard Museum and Tourist Trap. It was mildly interesting, but also unsettling. Not due to the (now empty) graves, but because there were three times as many staff as customers. Every time we went into one of their little shops there were a bunch of bored employees in Old West period dress staring at us. It’s gets unnerving after a while.

After escaping the vortex of tourism we continued across southern Kansas to Wichita. Along the way we got some pretty decent barbecue in a dusty no-name restaurant, and some miserably bad Mexican at a crappy “family” chain. Not the most exciting day of vacation ever, but not too bad. And they only got better from there.